Google Pagerank's objective is to use robots to guess which pages will be interesting to humans, and present the interesting pages first and the boring ones later. There are three ways an SEO can help you with this:
Tell you to write content that's actually interesting to humans. (Editors do this professionally, and pagerank originally attempted to do this by guessing that if people go to the effort to put links on their web pages then the targets are probably interesting to those people.)
Make sure that your interesting content is presented in a way that robots can find it. (An FAQ that tells you to put your keywords in titles and META tags can do this, or an HTML editor tool can do it automagically, but some people do need to pay someone else to RTFM for them, and theoretically an SEO can make money doing it.)
Lie to the robots so they guess that your customers' actually-uninteresting content is probably interesting, so the robots show the humans the boring SEO-assisted pages first instead of the actually interesting pages. This lying is the main business that effective SEOs really engage in. (Ineffective SEOs are in the business of lying to their customers about being effective SEOs, but they and their customers deserve each other and sort of by definition don't have a high enough pagerank to worry about.)
"Sneaky attacks" are SEO lies.
"A very closely monitored network of domains" is SEO lying too.
Hijacking blog comment services is really annoying SEO lying.
Robogenerating lots of pages with lots of popular search keywords, especially if you're building them into URL names, is SEO lying.
Robogenerating them without actually storing them anywhere might be technically interesting SEO lying, though disk space is so cheap these days that it might not be necessary.
Hijacking real pages using 302-Redirect attacks is technically interesting for about 15 minutes, but is really nasty spammer lying.
Googlebombing by using sneaky techniques to promote your "403 Weapons of Mass Destruction Not Found" and "Miserable Failure"->"whitehouse.gov" pages was technically similar to SEO lying - but it was clever and amusing metacontent, and deserved its 15 minutes of fame, and watching the sleazy Republicans reply in kind was amusing too, but it's Been Done Now.
I've got plenty of knowledge, I just wasn't thinking. So thanks for the correction (and fsck you, too:-) That does make it a more interesting battery, especially with the fast charge; I'm not sure if there's enough information available to evaluate energy density compared to weight or only volume (and if it's volume, you have to decide whether to compare AA batteries as oblongs or cylinders or packed cylinders, or for automotive applications, you'd obviously use different form factors.)
Bankruptcy's obviously a dodge here, so it'd be good if more people get to go spank them and shut them down. Since I'm assuming he'll keep spamming, it shouldn't be a problem to get more people annoyed at him.
Anarchy isn't crime or destruction
on
Inside the PSP
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Using the hardware for something new and creative that the designers never thought of is anarchy in action. Finding ways to use it that escape the "intellectual property" model the games companies want is also anarchy in action.
Disassembling somebody *else's* PSP is criminal. Disassembling your own is merely art. Or Boredom in Action.
Redefining Handheld Gaming?
on
Inside the PSP
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Let's see, you're holding a small thing with a screen on it, twitching your thumbs for a long time, and making noises unless you use a headset. To me that sounds like you're following the *same* definitions of hand-held thumb candy that have been around for a long time, but the picture's better:-)
Wireless is potentially a real change - if it's doing things with multiplayer games that you couldn't do before in the handheld space, that's somewhat new, though they've been done with console/pc-based games, so the main new feature is that you can play them from somewhere other than at home, as long as there's a WiFi connection you can use. I assume it's supporting downloadable games as opposed to just cartridges, though they could do things with Memory Stick if they wanted, and that's a bit of a change, but as long as the prices are similar, it's not really much change.
Cell-phone wireless data standards would be more revolutionary (if less compatible) - you could do game things like EA's Majestic or whatever it was that have location-dependent clues or interaction, or could do things with nearby people or provide portable games that let you talk to the people you're fragging\\\\\\\\cooperating with the way wired games let you do, or you could exchange pictures of where you are when you're somewhere other than your basement.
But building tools that can be used for cool games is one problem - writing games that actually turn out to be cool, or turn out to be popular, is a much different skill, and can be a lot harder to get right.
A standard AA battery is about 14mm diameter, 48mm long, or 9408 mm**3 if you treat it as square instead of round, and NiMH batteries store about 2000 mAh (old designs ~1600, newer designs 2400.) This is 8246 mm**3, so 87% as large, with 1/4 the storage capacity. On the other hand, NiCd AA are usually about 700 mAh, and they're nasty enough material it would be good to replace those.
It may be better than lead-acid, so it might be ok for transportation (and differences in memory effect are important), and good charging speed is always valuable, but it doesn't seem likely that power/weight ratios are likely to come close to NiMH. It's not clear from the article what the cost comparisons are like (lead-acid is usually dirt-cheap, but the weight is a big problem for cars.)
You didn't see *me* saying anything positive about our mates in ICANN (ICANN can eat my shorts too.) (I'll say positive things about Esther, who was one of the founders, but she wasn't successful, and it's gotten far worse since she left.) I don't see the ITU / UN improving the process - I primarily expect them to continue the wrong-headed directions and unresponsiveness to end users and reality that ICANN has, and using it to grind axes of their own. If Bush hadn't been elected, my knees would jerk just as strongly about the US government reasserting control as they do about the UN; the only thing positive about the UN proposal is that it's not the Bush Administration, at least not directly.....
If anybody tries to turn things into a game of chicken, either the structure of information in a bottom-up Internet design will make them irrelevant, or they'll just damage things and the Internet will gradually route around them. In particular, the domain name system doesn't control access to a market - connectivity does, and DNS is fundamentally a convenience that can alternatively be provided by Google or something like them. If somebody's censorship network makes it hard for outsiders to access Chinese users, it also makes it hard for Chinese users to access the outside, and that's bad for everybody.
The primary DNS issue where dumping ICANN for somebody else (as long as it's not Verisign) can make things work better for the Chinese market is the problem of internationalizing domain names. The original design's ASCII-centricness has led them to back themselves into a corner, with appalling botches like Verisign's design as the leading proposals to "fix" things, by providing solutions for the web that break email, ssh, instant messaging, and other protocols. Needs to get fixed. It'd be nice if IPv6 got itself deployed (at least for a while, ICANN's decision that it owns IPv6 address space and wants to charge way to much for this essentially unlimited resource delayed deployment by slowing user demand, but Cisco and Juniper need to ship routers that really work well with IPv6 before it'll be widespread.) But those comments go back to my contention that ICANN cares about IP as Intellectual Property, not as Internet Protocol - which does at least limit the set of things they feel motivated about messing up, and I don't feel optimistic that the ITU's vision is as narrowly limited.
As far as depeering goes, here in the US market there's a lot of differences of opinion about how much peering really matters - the price of bandwidth has been in total free-fall since before the telecom bust of ~2000, largely because Moore's Law and equivalent behaviour in the fiber capacity technology has meant that bandwidth costs are unknowable but definitely quite low, and many people are starting to believe that it's often more cost-effective to simply buy transit than to bother with peering unless they're in some niche ISP markets (conversely, most niche markets are definitely transit customers.) Europe's markets have evolved a bit differently, so you'll see big public exchange points like LINX and AMSIX, and I don't know Asia that well. But things that were really important at US$2500/month/megabit/second often don't matter as much at $25/month/megabit/second, especially if some local telecom monopoly or city street bureaucrats want to charge you several orders of magnitude more to run connectivity to another building a kilometer away than you're paying to haul your bits across the ocean after that.
It's worse than that - bankruptcy laws are designed to fairly allocate the debtor's remaining assets between creditors, and Chapter 11 is designed to allow debtors that are bankrupt to continue operating because they can generate enough money to pay back their creditors more than if you simply shut them down and sell off the chairs and file cabinets (as opposed to Chapter 7, where you do shut them down and divvy up the cash and other assets.)
This means that as long as they're in Chapter 11, they'll be continuing to spam, and they'll probably be continuing to pay Scotty a salary (unless they fire him, which is unlikely.) This isn't Scotty personally going bankrupt, it's just his corporation. It might or might not emerge from bankruptcy, but if it doesn't, you're probably right that he'll come up with some new sleazy business rather than doing something legitimate.
You're both missing the point of bankruptcy laws - it's not primarily to protect the debtor, it's to protect the creditors by giving each of them a fair share of any remaining assets. Yes, it's generally not good public policy to leave people starving on the streets with their kids, but the primary reason that bankruptcy laws let a debtor keep as much as they do is to get maximum cooperation, so the creditors feel they've been treated fairly (as opposed to the first creditor in line getting all of the deadbeat's remaining assets, or the creditor with the biggest lawyers.) This makes it less risky for creditors to lend people money (although they obviously only want to lend money when there's a reasonable chance of getting paid back), so that's good for people who want to be able to borrow money.
With corporate bankruptcy, as opposed to strictly personal bankruptcy, not only is there no bankrupt human starving on the streets, but the "Chapter 11" process recognizes that often the creditors can get more of their money back if the company is allowed to operate for a while, as opposed to liquidating its assets for whatever they can be sold for.
In this case, of course, Chapter 11 is a *Bad* *Thing*, because everything that OptInRealBig was doing was evil, so allowing it to operate longer to pay off some of its debts means allowing it to continue doing evil. And it sounds like Scotty Richter, being evil but not stupid, designed the corporate structure so that just because it goes bankrupt, that doesn't mean he loses his personal assets, it just means he's not being paid dividends on his stock (though during the Chapter 11 period he's probably still getting a salary.)
My first Netnews post was in about 1981, when netnews and most Unix email ran on dialup. I really *like* being able to have near-real-time email conversations (as opposed to needing IM-like things), but it's not that critical for most activities.
Did PostGrey let you whitelist mail servers, or were your customers too widespread for that to help?
There've been a lot of press releases from groups like the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) about "internet governance" and similar topics, but what they're really doing is using the near-universal dislike for ICANN to accomplish other goals. Typical announcements talk about several things:
Replacing ICANN's US-centric control of the DNS TLD space with ITU control. That's not necessarily such a bad thing - ICANN really cares about only one definition of "IP", which is "Intellectual Property", and making sure that US-style IP owners can get what they want. This shows up not only in name dispute processes, but also in the rabidly anti-privacy requirements that ICANN imposes on all registrars for collecting "accurate" whois information, to make sure that any domain name owner can be served with a subpoena. ITU may not be better; the one advantage of ICANN is that it's theoretically possible to throw the bums out, or to have the ccTLD owners get together to ignore them.
Subsidizing Internet Connectivity to Africa and other developing regions - Sure, everybody feels bad that poor people can't always get Internet connectivity, and it's good when charities can help. Many of the WSIS types want to imposes taxation on the richer countries' internet infrastructures to subsidize this, which is a bad idea. The right first step is to notice that almost all the countries that have trouble getting internet connectivity have Government-Run Telecom Monopolies, or privatized monopoly providers, which in most cases provide very expensive limited capacity telephones; they not only don't like competition from VOIP, they're not competent at providing Internet access, so subsidizing internet connectivity to them is a waste of money. Typical Internet cafes in much of Africa get service over satellite, which is slow and expensive but doesn't require PTT infrastructure, unlike wired service, and doesn't usually require licensing, unlike microwave service.
Censorship - China's the biggest promoter of this definition of "Governance", but there are other countries that also don't like free presses and uncontrolled websites reporting about them, typically implemented as a part of cracking down on other violations of public values such as pornography. The "Great Firewall of China" may not be very good at preventing PCs from becoming infected zombies that send spam and DDOS attacks, but they do retain some control over citizens' access to politically incorrect websites and restrictions on internet cafes.
Spam. Everybody hates it, and governments occasionally try to make laws to stop it. They don't work, partly because the Internet is international and it's easy to move activities to other countries, but ITU governance isn't really going to help; the most effective things they could do would be to enforce universal registration requirements even more privacy-invading than ICANN's, so that anybody with a domain name could be located. It would mainly be used for censorship rather than stopping spam; spammers may be stupid, but they're sufficiently clever and persistent to find ways around it, if nothing else using IP addresses in URLs, or hijacking domains owned by legitimate users.
If you want to replace regular electricity sources, what matters isn't the efficiency per sq.cm, it's the cost of the equipment compared to alternative energy sources. If the efficiency is low, but the cost is cheap, you just use a bigger area; not a usually problem. Cost per kwh is really the right measurement for most of those applications, since you do need to amortize over the lifetime of the equipment, if you've got a good estimate of what that is.
There are applications for which the efficiency matters more directly, because the alternatives are vastly more expensive, or there are other constraints. For instance, spacecraft have issues with launching weight and available surface area, and solar-powered unmanned surveillance spook planes also have those problems (probably surface area's more important for them than weight is.)
For some residential applications, efficiency can matter, for instance if you're trying to power your house with solar cells only mounted on your roof, but that's still really about economics, because you're comparing the cost of solar with buying power from the power company. A more efficient solar cell might generate more power from your roof area, but if it costs too much, you won't use it, you'll buy power. (
Suppose you want to install a generic Pentium 4 version of Gentoo. What torrents do you need to download if you want to be nice and do torrents instead of just emerging everythying? I assume you need install-x86-universal-2005.0.iso and packages-pentium4-2005.0.iso, but do you also need all the q3,q4,q5 stuff and the stage1/stage2/stage3 stuff, or are all of those included in the "x-86 universal" part?
.... burning the village to save us from the enemy. The FEC always talks about protecting individual free speech, while finding ways to make big corporate contributions feasible and making sure fat cats get what they want. McCain-Feingold worked really well in making sure that the last US Presidential election spent more *countable* money than ever before, leave aside all the under-the-table help from the "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth" and the other pro-Bush front groups.
The recent "Bi-Partisan Campaign Reform Act" is turning out to be a real headache for people who support parties other than the two leading ones who made the rules - it's not just documentation, it's a lot of organizational and financial restructuring. I'm not sure how much that was deliberate (though the Democrats were much more worried about the Greens than the Republicans were about the little right-winger parties or either side was about the Libertarians), and how much of it was mostly maneuvering around each other.
End-to-End Protocols, Man-In-The-Middle providers
on
VoIP Wiretapping
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Most VOIP protocols, like most P2P file-sharing programs and many Instant Messaging systems, use some kind of centralized directory server to handle database lookups and initial connection messages, and end-to-end connections directly between the end users to carry the actual conversation. For VOIP-to-telco gateways, wiretapping is easy, because you can do it at the telco end and just add some database support.
For pure IP telephony, though, the obvious way to wiretap is to tweak the call setup, so instead of the voice channel going from Alice to Bob, there are two voice channels, from Alice-to-KGB and KGB-to-Bob. Even if there's end-to-end encryption on the voice channel (which is sadly lacking in too many implementations), that doesn't stop the wiretap from working, because the KGB is an endpoint and has the key. If you have an adequate public key infrastructure, you can prevent this by authenticating the call setup messages. But if you don't have that, you're toast; in some cases you can use SSH-like "remember the signature key they used last time" protocols, or you can read your Diffie-Hellman authentication message over the phone if you recognize the other person's voice, but for tricks like that, your VOIP software needs to give you visibility into and ideally control over that process.
So regulatable VOIP service providers, who handle the database lookup portion of calls in countries with wiretap-greedy spooks, may be forced to pay extra to develop wiretap-friendly control software. An intermediate step, which the FBI has been all too successfull in getting US regulators to approve, is to get visibility into the call setup process, similar to old-fashioned pen registers, so they at least know who's talking to whom, and can often get that from the telcos without a formal warrant, using some less-stringent process like an administrative subpoena, and often with gag orders forbidding the telco to tell the wiretap victim.
That's a big problem with closed applications such as Skype, by the way - even if they use some good crypto algorithms, which they say they do, you can't tell what they're doing with them, and whether they're leaking authentication information. (Too bad, because they're a non-US provider who might be harder to bully, at least if they build some corporate separation between their software developers and their VOIP-to-Telco service providers, which I'm not sure if they have.)
Asterisk is open-source, which has the advantage that you can see if something like that is built in, and also has the advantage that it's usually operated by end-users, not by service providers. The SIP protocol family is designed to support proxies and indirection which are useful in building services where some bits are managed by one entity and some by another, e.g. PBXs at both ends, a directory service provider or two in the middle, maybe some voicemail providers or conferencing servers or whatever - it's a big step up from the old H.323 protocols, which pretty much required building closed systems.
Almost every grocery store I've been to has an ATM machine. From a privacy perspective, it's much better to go to the ATM in the store, get some cash, and spend it at the store than it is to pay for your groceries with either the same ATM or a credit card.
Many grocery stores have their frequent-customer discount cards, which track your purchases if you use them - in my case, "John Doe", who lives at "General Delivery" in my town/zipcode, gets his purchase history recorded, and they're quite happy to correlate my purchases of coffee and Irish whiskey and whipping cream, or tofu and white wine, or tortillas and beer, or catfood and cat litter. No reason for them to know it's me.
The US does have some leftover parts of the Privacy Act of 1974 that occasionally protect people from government collection of their Social Security Number, though Driver's Licenses are now required to collect the number, and many other government activities have gotten permission to demand the number.
There are private transactions where the government mandates that an individual provide a business with their SSN, primarily anything taxable, like hiring somebody, or opening a bank account that pays interest, and by now they mandate it for most bank accounts even if they don't pay interest, and they mandate it for any medical transaction involving Medicare or most other government-funded health care.
For transactions where the government does not mandate that a business collect an SSN, they almost never place any restrictions on the business's activities with it, and they don't say that the business can't refuse to deal with you if you don't provide it - you're on your own.
There are a very small number of cases where some government, mostly state, places limits on private use of SSNs, or otherwise insists on some kinds of privacy protection. But in practice, those are usually not effective.
Somebody moderated Timesprout's article as "Funny", and I got to metamoderate that. I don't see any evidence that it was intended to be funny, but it was a good article, and "Funny" is usually a positive rating, so I let it stick. Looks like "Insightful" has overridden that now, which is really a better rating.
Credit-Card CDs are too easy to break if you just carry the things around in your wallet - you'd have to put it in a reasonably stiff envelope, or do something like give them a credit-card CD and also a full-size CD.
You don't need Gnome or Evolution or other big window managers - there are plenty of small ones like BlackBox or Windowmaker or the twm family. TWM worked fine on my 33MHz 386 with X11R2, don't see why it shouldn't work ok today:-) (OpenLook was a bit slow, but it'd probably also do fine with modern CPUs and enough RAM.)
You might try talking to your university library folks. There's probably a significant need for them to distribute legally distributable material at the university; Open Software distributions are an obvious candidate, but they might also be interested in redistributing jam-band concert recordings or whatever (especially if your school has a music department that could be talked into it.)
A big advantage of BitTorrent in an environment like that is that it not only reeks of officialdom and academic freedom, but it can help the university's bandwidth problems by putting copies of the material on the university's LAN infrastructure, so students aren't hauling multiple copies in from outside (and they can get their stuff a lot faster.) A reasonable infrastructure is probably one machine with a fast CPU and lot of memory to act as a tracker and torrent-tracker-translater, and a few white-box PCs with lots of disk drives to act as storage/distribution. You do risk ending up with a job as a sysadmin at the library department if you're not careful:-)
Slashdot Mirror
- Tell you to write content that's actually interesting to humans. (Editors do this professionally, and pagerank originally attempted to do this by guessing that if people go to the effort to put links on their web pages then the targets are probably interesting to those people.)
- Make sure that your interesting content is presented in a way that robots can find it. (An FAQ that tells you to put your keywords in titles and META tags can do this, or an HTML editor tool can do it automagically, but some people do need to pay someone else to RTFM for them, and theoretically an SEO can make money doing it.)
- Lie to the robots so they guess that your customers' actually-uninteresting content is probably interesting, so the robots show the humans the boring SEO-assisted pages first instead of the actually interesting pages. This lying is the main business that effective SEOs really engage in. (Ineffective SEOs are in the business of lying to their customers about being effective SEOs, but they and their customers deserve each other and sort of by definition don't have a high enough pagerank to worry about.)
- "Sneaky attacks" are SEO lies.
- "A very closely monitored network of domains" is SEO lying too.
- Hijacking blog comment services is really annoying SEO lying.
- Robogenerating lots of pages with lots of popular search keywords, especially if you're building them into URL names, is SEO lying.
- Robogenerating them without actually storing them anywhere might be technically interesting SEO lying, though disk space is so cheap these days that it might not be necessary.
- Hijacking real pages using 302-Redirect attacks is technically interesting for about 15 minutes, but is really nasty spammer lying.
Googlebombing by using sneaky techniques to promote your "403 Weapons of Mass Destruction Not Found" and "Miserable Failure"->"whitehouse.gov" pages was technically similar to SEO lying - but it was clever and amusing metacontent, and deserved its 15 minutes of fame, and watching the sleazy Republicans reply in kind was amusing too, but it's Been Done Now.I've got plenty of knowledge, I just wasn't thinking. So thanks for the correction (and fsck you, too :-) That does make it a more interesting battery, especially with the fast charge; I'm not sure if there's enough information available to evaluate energy density compared to weight or only volume (and if it's volume, you have to decide whether to compare AA batteries as oblongs or cylinders or packed cylinders, or for automotive applications, you'd obviously use different form factors.)
Bankruptcy's obviously a dodge here, so it'd be good if more people get to go spank them and shut them down. Since I'm assuming he'll keep spamming, it shouldn't be a problem to get more people annoyed at him.
Disassembling somebody *else's* PSP is criminal. Disassembling your own is merely art. Or Boredom in Action.
Wireless is potentially a real change - if it's doing things with multiplayer games that you couldn't do before in the handheld space, that's somewhat new, though they've been done with console/pc-based games, so the main new feature is that you can play them from somewhere other than at home, as long as there's a WiFi connection you can use. I assume it's supporting downloadable games as opposed to just cartridges, though they could do things with Memory Stick if they wanted, and that's a bit of a change, but as long as the prices are similar, it's not really much change.
Cell-phone wireless data standards would be more revolutionary (if less compatible) - you could do game things like EA's Majestic or whatever it was that have location-dependent clues or interaction, or could do things with nearby people or provide portable games that let you talk to the people you're fragging\\\\\\\\cooperating with the way wired games let you do, or you could exchange pictures of where you are when you're somewhere other than your basement.
But building tools that can be used for cool games is one problem - writing games that actually turn out to be cool, or turn out to be popular, is a much different skill, and can be a lot harder to get right.
It may be better than lead-acid, so it might be ok for transportation (and differences in memory effect are important), and good charging speed is always valuable, but it doesn't seem likely that power/weight ratios are likely to come close to NiMH. It's not clear from the article what the cost comparisons are like (lead-acid is usually dirt-cheap, but the weight is a big problem for cars.)
If anybody tries to turn things into a game of chicken, either the structure of information in a bottom-up Internet design will make them irrelevant, or they'll just damage things and the Internet will gradually route around them. In particular, the domain name system doesn't control access to a market - connectivity does, and DNS is fundamentally a convenience that can alternatively be provided by Google or something like them. If somebody's censorship network makes it hard for outsiders to access Chinese users, it also makes it hard for Chinese users to access the outside, and that's bad for everybody.
The primary DNS issue where dumping ICANN for somebody else (as long as it's not Verisign) can make things work better for the Chinese market is the problem of internationalizing domain names. The original design's ASCII-centricness has led them to back themselves into a corner, with appalling botches like Verisign's design as the leading proposals to "fix" things, by providing solutions for the web that break email, ssh, instant messaging, and other protocols. Needs to get fixed. It'd be nice if IPv6 got itself deployed (at least for a while, ICANN's decision that it owns IPv6 address space and wants to charge way to much for this essentially unlimited resource delayed deployment by slowing user demand, but Cisco and Juniper need to ship routers that really work well with IPv6 before it'll be widespread.) But those comments go back to my contention that ICANN cares about IP as Intellectual Property, not as Internet Protocol - which does at least limit the set of things they feel motivated about messing up, and I don't feel optimistic that the ITU's vision is as narrowly limited.
As far as depeering goes, here in the US market there's a lot of differences of opinion about how much peering really matters - the price of bandwidth has been in total free-fall since before the telecom bust of ~2000, largely because Moore's Law and equivalent behaviour in the fiber capacity technology has meant that bandwidth costs are unknowable but definitely quite low, and many people are starting to believe that it's often more cost-effective to simply buy transit than to bother with peering unless they're in some niche ISP markets (conversely, most niche markets are definitely transit customers.) Europe's markets have evolved a bit differently, so you'll see big public exchange points like LINX and AMSIX, and I don't know Asia that well. But things that were really important at US$2500/month/megabit/second often don't matter as much at $25/month/megabit/second, especially if some local telecom monopoly or city street bureaucrats want to charge you several orders of magnitude more to run connectivity to another building a kilometer away than you're paying to haul your bits across the ocean after that.
This means that as long as they're in Chapter 11, they'll be continuing to spam, and they'll probably be continuing to pay Scotty a salary (unless they fire him, which is unlikely.) This isn't Scotty personally going bankrupt, it's just his corporation. It might or might not emerge from bankruptcy, but if it doesn't, you're probably right that he'll come up with some new sleazy business rather than doing something legitimate.
With corporate bankruptcy, as opposed to strictly personal bankruptcy, not only is there no bankrupt human starving on the streets, but the "Chapter 11" process recognizes that often the creditors can get more of their money back if the company is allowed to operate for a while, as opposed to liquidating its assets for whatever they can be sold for.
In this case, of course, Chapter 11 is a *Bad* *Thing*, because everything that OptInRealBig was doing was evil, so allowing it to operate longer to pay off some of its debts means allowing it to continue doing evil. And it sounds like Scotty Richter, being evil but not stupid, designed the corporate structure so that just because it goes bankrupt, that doesn't mean he loses his personal assets, it just means he's not being paid dividends on his stock (though during the Chapter 11 period he's probably still getting a salary.)
Did PostGrey let you whitelist mail servers, or were your customers too widespread for that to help?
- Replacing ICANN's US-centric control of the DNS TLD space with ITU control. That's not necessarily such a bad thing - ICANN really cares about only one definition of "IP", which is "Intellectual Property", and making sure that US-style IP owners can get what they want. This shows up not only in name dispute processes, but also in the rabidly anti-privacy requirements that ICANN imposes on all registrars for collecting "accurate" whois information, to make sure that any domain name owner can be served with a subpoena. ITU may not be better; the one advantage of ICANN is that it's theoretically possible to throw the bums out, or to have the ccTLD owners get together to ignore them.
- Subsidizing Internet Connectivity to Africa and other developing regions - Sure, everybody feels bad that poor people can't always get Internet connectivity, and it's good when charities can help. Many of the WSIS types want to imposes taxation on the richer countries' internet infrastructures to subsidize this, which is a bad idea. The right first step is to notice that almost all the countries that have trouble getting internet connectivity have Government-Run Telecom Monopolies, or privatized monopoly providers, which in most cases provide very expensive limited capacity telephones; they not only don't like competition from VOIP, they're not competent at providing Internet access, so subsidizing internet connectivity to them is a waste of money. Typical Internet cafes in much of Africa get service over satellite, which is slow and expensive but doesn't require PTT infrastructure, unlike wired service, and doesn't usually require licensing, unlike microwave service.
- Censorship - China's the biggest promoter of this definition of "Governance", but there are other countries that also don't like free presses and uncontrolled websites reporting about them, typically implemented as a part of cracking down on other violations of public values such as pornography. The "Great Firewall of China" may not be very good at preventing PCs from becoming infected zombies that send spam and DDOS attacks, but they do retain some control over citizens' access to politically incorrect websites and restrictions on internet cafes.
- Spam. Everybody hates it, and governments occasionally try to make laws to stop it. They don't work, partly because the Internet is international and it's easy to move activities to other countries, but ITU governance isn't really going to help; the most effective things they could do would be to enforce universal registration requirements even more privacy-invading than ICANN's, so that anybody with a domain name could be located. It would mainly be used for censorship rather than stopping spam; spammers may be stupid, but they're sufficiently clever and persistent to find ways around it, if nothing else using IP addresses in URLs, or hijacking domains owned by legitimate users.
Overall, it's a bad thing, and a scam.There are applications for which the efficiency matters more directly, because the alternatives are vastly more expensive, or there are other constraints. For instance, spacecraft have issues with launching weight and available surface area, and solar-powered unmanned surveillance spook planes also have those problems (probably surface area's more important for them than weight is.)
For some residential applications, efficiency can matter, for instance if you're trying to power your house with solar cells only mounted on your roof, but that's still really about economics, because you're comparing the cost of solar with buying power from the power company. A more efficient solar cell might generate more power from your roof area, but if it costs too much, you won't use it, you'll buy power. (
Suppose you want to install a generic Pentium 4 version of Gentoo. What torrents do you need to download if you want to be nice and do torrents instead of just emerging everythying? I assume you need install-x86-universal-2005.0.iso and packages-pentium4-2005.0.iso, but do you also need all the q3,q4,q5 stuff and the stage1/stage2/stage3 stuff, or are all of those included in the "x-86 universal" part?
The recent "Bi-Partisan Campaign Reform Act" is turning out to be a real headache for people who support parties other than the two leading ones who made the rules - it's not just documentation, it's a lot of organizational and financial restructuring. I'm not sure how much that was deliberate (though the Democrats were much more worried about the Greens than the Republicans were about the little right-winger parties or either side was about the Libertarians), and how much of it was mostly maneuvering around each other.
For pure IP telephony, though, the obvious way to wiretap is to tweak the call setup, so instead of the voice channel going from Alice to Bob, there are two voice channels, from Alice-to-KGB and KGB-to-Bob. Even if there's end-to-end encryption on the voice channel (which is sadly lacking in too many implementations), that doesn't stop the wiretap from working, because the KGB is an endpoint and has the key. If you have an adequate public key infrastructure, you can prevent this by authenticating the call setup messages. But if you don't have that, you're toast; in some cases you can use SSH-like "remember the signature key they used last time" protocols, or you can read your Diffie-Hellman authentication message over the phone if you recognize the other person's voice, but for tricks like that, your VOIP software needs to give you visibility into and ideally control over that process.
So regulatable VOIP service providers, who handle the database lookup portion of calls in countries with wiretap-greedy spooks, may be forced to pay extra to develop wiretap-friendly control software. An intermediate step, which the FBI has been all too successfull in getting US regulators to approve, is to get visibility into the call setup process, similar to old-fashioned pen registers, so they at least know who's talking to whom, and can often get that from the telcos without a formal warrant, using some less-stringent process like an administrative subpoena, and often with gag orders forbidding the telco to tell the wiretap victim.
That's a big problem with closed applications such as Skype, by the way - even if they use some good crypto algorithms, which they say they do, you can't tell what they're doing with them, and whether they're leaking authentication information. (Too bad, because they're a non-US provider who might be harder to bully, at least if they build some corporate separation between their software developers and their VOIP-to-Telco service providers, which I'm not sure if they have.)
Asterisk is open-source, which has the advantage that you can see if something like that is built in, and also has the advantage that it's usually operated by end-users, not by service providers. The SIP protocol family is designed to support proxies and indirection which are useful in building services where some bits are managed by one entity and some by another, e.g. PBXs at both ends, a directory service provider or two in the middle, maybe some voicemail providers or conferencing servers or whatever - it's a big step up from the old H.323 protocols, which pretty much required building closed systems.
At least if your address is the same by the time they get out after their grand theft conviction or whatever...
Hey, if he's doing that, then he probably doesn't need to buy those pills they keep advertising on the Internet....
Many grocery stores have their frequent-customer discount cards, which track your purchases if you use them - in my case, "John Doe", who lives at "General Delivery" in my town/zipcode, gets his purchase history recorded, and they're quite happy to correlate my purchases of coffee and Irish whiskey and whipping cream, or tofu and white wine, or tortillas and beer, or catfood and cat litter. No reason for them to know it's me.
There are private transactions where the government mandates that an individual provide a business with their SSN, primarily anything taxable, like hiring somebody, or opening a bank account that pays interest, and by now they mandate it for most bank accounts even if they don't pay interest, and they mandate it for any medical transaction involving Medicare or most other government-funded health care.
For transactions where the government does not mandate that a business collect an SSN, they almost never place any restrictions on the business's activities with it, and they don't say that the business can't refuse to deal with you if you don't provide it - you're on your own.
There are a very small number of cases where some government, mostly state, places limits on private use of SSNs, or otherwise insists on some kinds of privacy protection. But in practice, those are usually not effective.
Somebody moderated Timesprout's article as "Funny", and I got to metamoderate that. I don't see any evidence that it was intended to be funny, but it was a good article, and "Funny" is usually a positive rating, so I let it stick. Looks like "Insightful" has overridden that now, which is really a better rating.
Credit-Card CDs are too easy to break if you just carry the things around in your wallet - you'd have to put it in a reasonably stiff envelope, or do something like give them a credit-card CD and also a full-size CD.
You don't need Gnome or Evolution or other big window managers - there are plenty of small ones like BlackBox or Windowmaker or the twm family. TWM worked fine on my 33MHz 386 with X11R2, don't see why it shouldn't work ok today :-) (OpenLook was a bit slow, but it'd probably also do fine with modern CPUs and enough RAM.)
EFF's index of Computers and Academic Freedom - CAF isn't directly an EFF project, but they provide hosting space for it. They've probably dealt with some other schools about similar issues.
A big advantage of BitTorrent in an environment like that is that it not only reeks of officialdom and academic freedom, but it can help the university's bandwidth problems by putting copies of the material on the university's LAN infrastructure, so students aren't hauling multiple copies in from outside (and they can get their stuff a lot faster.) A reasonable infrastructure is probably one machine with a fast CPU and lot of memory to act as a tracker and torrent-tracker-translater, and a few white-box PCs with lots of disk drives to act as storage/distribution. You do risk ending up with a job as a sysadmin at the library department if you're not careful :-)